I Saw America Changed Through Music

In 1952, a twenty-nine-year-old record collector named Harry Everett Smith squirreled himself away in a two-room office at 111 West Forty-Seventh Street, chewing on peyote buttons and compiling a six-LP compendium for Folkways Records. The Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by Folkways in 1952 and reissued on CD by the Smithsonian in 1997, was culled exclusively from Smith’s 78 collection and contains only songs issued between 1927 and 1932, that fruitful five-year span between the advent of electrical recording and the apex of the Great Depression.

Taken as a whole (and that’s the entire point), the Anthology is a wild and instructive portrait of a young country working itself out via song. It’s also deeply confounding. There are times when I have clung to it as a kind of last hope, believing that it’s an object that unlocks other objects; there are other times when I have found it solipsistic and nonsensical and inherently ill conceived. Whatever the Anthology offers, it’s not revealed quickly.

Smith is about as close as the practice of 78 collecting has ever come to producing a known cult figure.

Like most serious collectors, Harry Smith got going early. The arc of his life is both predictable—as if, like a river, it could have only ever led to one place—and meandering. He was born on May 29, 1923, the son of a boat captain and a schoolteacher, theosophists who encouraged his burgeoning interest in ethnography. He spent a good chunk of his high school years studying the tribal ceremonies of the Lummi Indians in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, and started amassing 78s around the same time. The first one he bought was by Tommy McClellan, a rough-voiced blues singer who recorded in Chicago in the early 1940s. (“It sounded strange and I looked for others,” Smith later said of it.)

In his early twenties, Smith was just undersized enough to be able to crawl inside the fuselage of an airplane, and after six months working for Boeing as an engine degreaser, he decamped to San Francisco, then Berkeley, and finally New York City, where, in desperate need of cash for things like food and shelter, he tried to pitch his record collection wholesale to Folkways Records. Instead, cofounder Moe Asch persuaded him to produce a multi-disc compilation for the label. Asch’s biographer, Peter Goldsmith, suggests that Smith’s “appearance and manner” might have reminded Asch of his pal and partner Woody Guthrie, another charmingly arrogant polymath who recorded for Folkways in the 1940s. (Incidentally, Guthrie—who spent a good percentage of 1952 in a state psychiatric ward—adored the Anthology, and in a letter to Asch admitted to playing it “several hundreds of times.”) In a 1972 Sing Out! interview with Ethel Raim and Bob Norman, Asch confirmed his admiration for Smith’s purview, saying “[Smith] understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature, and their relationship to the world.” Smith was paid $200 for his work on the Anthology and promised a 20-cent royalty for each copy sold.

Although he’s now equally beloved for his experimental films, paintings, and animations, Smith is about as close as the practice of 78 collecting has ever come to producing a known cult figure. (These days Robert Crumb also qualifies, but his collecting is far more incidental to his legacy.) Smith, who died in 1991 in room 328 of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, a building already infamous for its output of body bags, was the kind of guy who designed his own tarot cards. He was a dedicated mystic, a consecrated bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (a fraternal organization based on Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law), and, supposedly, an initiated Lummi shaman. He palled around with folks like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, and was eventually appointed “Shaman in Residence” at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a Buddhist-inspired university founded by an exiled Tibetan tulku. Along with records and rare books, which he arranged on his shelves by height, Smith collected Seminole textiles, hand-decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs, and anything shaped like a hamburger. He lived with a goldfish in a series of tiny apartments crammed with ephemera (quilts, weavings, clay models, mounted string figures, women’s dresses). In 1984 he donated “the largest known paper airplane collection in the world”—sourced exclusively from the streets of New York City—to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Smith was also an obsessive chronicler of found sound, be it the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians or the wheezing vagrants of the Lower East Side; one Fourth of July he recorded every single noise he encountered.

In almost all the photos I’ve seen of Harry Smith, he’s wearing plastic-framed, thick-lensed eyeglasses and sporting a robust, scraggly beard. His skin looks papery but his eyes are sharp, narrowed, and alive under two drooping lids. In my favorite shot, taken by Ginsberg in 1985, he’s pouring whole milk from a cardboard carton into a glass jar (“transforming milk into milk,” Ginsberg noted). His face is approximately 80 percent glasses. Atop his head, little tufts of white hair wisp to the left, the consistency of fresh spiderweb. He appears to be about ten thousand years old.

Cantankerous and exacting in the manner of most collectors, Smith often bickered with his peers about money or objects. He would demand to borrow a book or record and then refuse to give it back. As his archivist and friend Rani Singh told me, he was constantly informing people that their belongings were better off in his collection. (“‘It should be in my collection, it shouldn’t be in your collection,’” she recalled him saying.) His compulsions were driven by a fierce internal logic; Smith was painstaking in his pursuit of proper serialization, even if it meant pilfering other people’s most beloved shit. Things, he believed, belonged next to other things—like sentences in a story, books along a shelf, songs on an LP. “He was looking for undercurrents. He was looking for ideas that were disappearing, nuances that were disappearing, trying to make connections not just among 78s from Georgia or North Carolina versus upper New York State or Canada, but connections between the string figures that he was interested in from all cultures across the world,” Singh said. “He was comparing string figures to tarot cards to 78 records to creation myths to all these other things and finding the things that link all of us as humans together.”

Smith was painstaking in his pursuit of proper serialization, even if it meant pilfering other people’s most beloved shit.

It’s still hard to quantify the cultural impact of the Anthology. In the liner notes to its Smithsonian reissue, John Fahey wrote: “Had he never done anything with his life but this Anthology, Harry Smith would still have borne the mark of genius across his forehead. I’d match the Anthology up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled. Dead Sea Scrolls? Nah. I’ll take the Anthology. Make no mistake: there was no ‘folk’ canon before Smith’s work. That he had compiled such a definitive document only became apparent much later, of course. We record-collecting types, sifting through many more records than he did, eventually reached the same conclusions: these were the true goods.”

There’s also no satisfying term for what Smith did. Both “compiler” and “curator” feel too removed, too impersonal. Smith didn’t just corral a bunch of parts, he dreamed a whole. While I’ll admit to a tendency toward certain flights of sentimentality—and while I don’t want to discount either Smith’s intentionality or his authorship—I also don’t think it’s so preposterous to believe that these records were delivered to Smith for this precise purpose and that he ordered them as a poet orders words on a page, channeling, building meaning from nothing, becoming a physical conduit for a spiritual truth. That Smith understood how to place these records in useful dialogue is a function of his expertise and experience, but there is also a sense, here, of a story that needed telling. That’s not an unfamiliar feeling for most 78 collectors.

In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus calls the Anthology “an occult document disguised as an academic treatise on stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology.” I think that costume is essential to its premise; although it might seem counterintuitive, the illusion of authority allows the Anthology both its insularity and its limitations. Anyone who attempts to use it as an objective textbook—as the definitive, omnipotent document implied by its title—will be devastated by its shortcomings. It’s a wonky portrait of America at nearly all stages in its development. It contains no field recordings sourced from the Library of Congress or anywhere else and excludes entire communities of citizens, including Native Americans, immigrants, and (with a few exceptions) people who lived in the northern half of the United States.

Per Smith’s vision, every track on the Anthology was professionally rendered and released, an oddly normative and antiacademic approach to something as intrinsically noncommercial as folk music. Smith clearly wanted to exalt the records people actually hunted down, bought, and cherished, just as he did.

While the Anthology isn’t comprehensive, it’s still a self-wrought universe with its own logic and revelations. It encourages—maybe even requires—its listeners to devise their own (personal, imperfect) explanations for how and why people sing. It’s all in here, Smith is saying, and if you can accept the Anthology on faith, as the sacred text he clearly envisioned, its world might open up to you, become your own.